So, You Want to Make a Production Django App

A Little Background• Launching Production Django Apps since '06

and 0.9something beta

• Launched and Managed Django Websites, E-Commerce Sites, and Web Apps for brands such as:

• Rip Curl, UT San Diego, Callaway Golf, DC Shoes, Dunlop, PacSun, and many many more

Goals• Identify Common Pitfalls in Launching

• Point Out Django Gotchas

• Point Out Django Tools

• Help You Have a Smooth Launch

• Give Some Pointers on Managing and Maintaing a Django App

This Only Partially About Djangoand all about launching web apps

Going Production is...• Putting it in front of consumers

• Promoting It

• Customer data

• 24/7/365

• Someone Else Is Using It

• Your billing relationship changes

But First, Some Quick Tips

Simple Django Things

• DEBUG = False

• Style your 500 / 404.html

• HTTPS Admin, login, and .. anywhere sensitive information is submitted

• Make your Sites record accurate

Simple Non-Django Things

• Favicon

• Run a Site Crawler

• Redirect to one domain - www

• Check your browser console for errors

So What Makes Your App Ready?

The Big Questions

• Is it Stable?

• Did I get it Right?

• Does it Perform?

Stability

• Stability is about predictable performance

• Thorough testing

• A way to track bugs and issues

• A way to monitor what's happening

Bug Tracking

• 500 Emails - Send these to a Gmail Account

• Sentry is cool

• Rotate your logs

• Stomp 500s, signal to noise is very important

Refactoring

• You probably didn't get all the data models and functionality right

• Following launch focus on fixing issues, not solving any misconceptions.

Ok, App Works Good, Until the Newsletter Went

Out

Performance part 1• Memcached + ANONYMOUS_CACHE

• Django Debug Toolbar

• {% cache %}

• But, don't cache session specific stuff!

• Use Production Scale Data

Performance part 2• We use Nginx + Gunicorn

• CDNs - use them, but use caution

• Expire Tags - speed without effort

• Premature Optimization is the root of all evil, but the night before launch is no longer premature, so save it in a temporary model on a signal damnit

Performance 2.1• Our Setup

• Static Media from CDN

• Nginx or ELB or other load balancer

• Gunicorn managed by Supervisord

• MySQL or Postgresql

• Memcached, Elasticsearch, RabbitMQ

Performance part 3• New Relic can tell you a lot

• Process long tasks with Celery

• Varnish can do wonders, if your app is doing the right thing

• But first optimize your queries and indexes

• Yes, you can do group bys and aggregates.. annotate and aggregate are not so intuitive

• DB Templates Are Expensive

Aggregate Digression

RateClass.objects.annotate(

hours = Sum("person__timeentry__hours")).filter(

person__timeentry__project__name="My Project')

)

But Enough About Performance

• Performance is usually something you see as you scale up and add complexity

• Your site should perform quickly, but even more importantly..

Things That Really Matter

Content!

• Is all the content the right content?

• No Lorem Ipsum

• Do all your forms submit? Are there human error messages.

• Is the contact information correct?

Browser Compatibility

• Did you check all your browsers?

• As a rule, CEOs use the oldest possible IE version

• There are over 100 million iPads, what does your site look like on one? CEOs usually have one of these too.

Security

• SSL logins! admins! everything!

• CSRF protection

• Are you assuming anything?

Search Matters• robots.txt

• canonical tags

• meta tags

• analytics tags

• duplicate content

What Used to Be Searched Also Matters

• Pages with rankings are valuable

• If it was a link on Google, don't make it a 404

Things You Should Have Already Done

Training

• Not everyone groks abstractions, explain how to do things

• Make sure your client knows that access to Users == Super User

• Take a moment to polish your Change List and Change Form Templates

Dev Site• Have one

• Make sure it doesn't send email to anyone

• Make sure it says "DEV SITE" somewhere on the front end

• Make sure it has robots.txt disallowing all

• If possible, control access

• Keep track of any integration credentials for sandbox vs production

Configuration Management

• Settings Can Get Unruly

• We use cascading imports to structure them

• Beware Stored Passwords!

Testing• Unit Tests are nice, if you have been doing

them all along

• Test it by hand

• Test it like a consumer

• - Bad / Missing Data

• - International Data / Unicode

Migrations

• Use South, or don't but be prepared to tear your hair out either way

• Is there existing data to import? Do a dry run - build this into management commands

Ok We Are Ready!

Launch is in 1 week• Lower your DNS TTL

• Make sure you have access to all the domain information

• Are all integrations ready for production? With production credentials?

• A Dry Run is worth the effort

• Do you know all the DNS records you are changing? Are the nameservers in your control?

• Test your site with /etc/hosts, make sure it is ready to go

• Write up a plan, and let everyone know the timing

Launch!• Sometimes, it is better to just get it done.

• But not always

• But sometimes, really, it just has to fly

• Walk through everything

• Run transactions on your credit card, and then cancel them

• Doubt everything

Deployment

• Revision your deploys with Git

• Automate it as much as possible

• But don't put off automating most of it

• Read the 11-Factor App

DNS Gotchas

• Nameservers! Don't change unless you know all the records that are there

• SPF, PTR - make sure your email makes it through the spam filter

• IT departments don't get CNAMEs, so watch your load balancers!

Woo Hoo! It's Up! Now What

Are We Done?

Post Launch

• Keep track of what you agreed to build.

• Good fences make good neighbors

• When You Launch, You are in Maintenance Mode. Make the Mental Shift!

Refactors, Again• Actually that did need to be a separate

model

• See, South was a good idea

• Ouch you should have used South

• Either way, you need to write a manage command

Maintenance Tips and Tricks

• Manage commands are really useful

• So is the shell

• Know what you plan to do on a server before logging in

The Long View

• Don't focus on the bad things, focus on what was achieved

• What simple things can you do to make the next one smoother

• Checklists!

Questions?